The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) is a bibliographic database.
Chronologically, its scope extends from the earliest Caxton incunabulum
(ca. 1473) through the last item printed in 1800. Geographically, it includes:

1. All relevant items printed in the British Isles in any language;

2. All relevant items printed in Colonial America, the United States
(1776-1800), and Canada; in any language;

3. All relevant items printed in territories governed by Britain
during any period through 1800, in any language;

4. All relevant items, printed wholly or partly in English, or other
British vernaculars, in any other part of the world. All letterpress items
(with these few exceptions: forms, trade and visiting cards, labels, tickets,
invitations, bookplates, playbills, concert and theater programs, playing
cards, games and puzzles), as well as some categories of engraved material,
are included.

The ESTC is also a union list. Over 1,500 institutions in North America,
the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia and New Zealand have reported their
holdings to the North American and English editorial offices of the ESTC;
each record in the file has appended to it a list of locations at which
copies of the item may be found.

At the time of writing the ESTC contains over 400,000 records, and
approximately 2,000,000 locations.

The ESTC is available in both CD-ROM and online versions. In the
United Kingdom and Australia it is available through BLAISE-LINE, the British
Library’s information network. In North America (and, increasingly, in
other parts of the world), it is available through the Research Libraries
Group, Inc., through two services: ---RLIN, used mainly by experienced
searchers and technical processing users, which offers MARC-tagged displays
and support for cataloging; and ---Eureka, which offers easy-to-use searching
tools and displays along with online help and e-mail support for sending
results over the Internet.

Except for billing purposes, neither RLG nor the British Library
have the technical resources to track usage of the file. Nevertheless,
we have been able to gather enough data to indicate the significance of
the project to the scholarly community. What follows are a) a selection
of quotations from articles and other publications, mail (electronic and
otherwise) received in this office, etc. attesting to the value of the
project; and b) a bibliography of items for which use of the was essential.

Testimonials

‘May I say that I think the ESTC
is the most remarkable research tool I have ever come across. Thanks to
its search capacity, I have found dozens of very interesting items I would
otherwise never have known about.’Lawrence
Stone, Princeton University.

‘The [ESTC] has become a model
for machine-readable union catalogs, as well as a catalyst for other national
efforts.’Beverly T.
Watkins. The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 22, 1992. ‘Vast electronic
catalog transforms research on the 18th century’.

‘The ESTC has transformed research by allowing the
scholar to concentrate on the content of works rather than on the process
of identifying and locating them. The researcher can request mixes of information
previously impossible to conceive, combining title words with place and
year of publication to sample the intellectual currents of the period,
or quickly running off a bibliography of even a minor author’s work. The
ESTC is more than a mere time-saver: it allows the scholar to play with
ideas, stirring in new concepts to allow a re-visioning of the initial
idea. It serves as a model of what humanists should expect from future
electronic tools.’ Michaelyn Burnette,
Humanities Librarian. February 1996 Newsletter of the Doreen B. Townsend
Center for the Humanities, University of California, Berkeley.

‘The expanded ESTC will make an enormous contribution
to facilitating the study of British history, literature, and cultural
studies. It is not too much to say that it will revolutionize that study
and permit researcher to answer questions that were impossible even to
formulate before ESTC.’Peter Davison,
Bibliographic Society, London. The Research Libraries Group News, issue
34, spring 1994.

'Recently the National Book Critic Circle selected
as Winner of its 1995 criticism award Robert Darnton’s ‘The forbidden best-sellers
of pre-revolutionary France’. ... On a number of occasions, [Professor
Darnton’s assistant] would turn to me, ... for help [and] ESTC provided
a number of answers.’Stephen Ferguson,
Princeton University.

'[As] editor-in-chief of the Sidney family library
catalogue I can tell you that the resources of the ESTC are essential for
our work of verifying and normalizing the over 4,000 titles in this 1665
catalogue.’ Germaine Warkentin, Victoria
College, University of Toronto.

‘As an on-going project, the Swift Poems Project, of
which I’m an editor, would be crippled without the ESTC. We use it constantly.’
James Woolley, Lafayette College.

‘Although it may seem odd that I used the ESTC
for what are basically French bibliographical studies, I believe it is
a credit to the database that it is inclusive enough to be used in that
manner.’ Everett C. Wilkie, Jr. Head
Librarian and Crofut Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts, The Connecticut
Historical Society.

‘I am currently writing a book about the role of the
book trade ... and I can honestly say that the project would be inconceivable
without access to ESTC. ... It’s a wonderful service to all early modern
scholars.’ David Brewer, University
of California, Berkeley.

‘The Edinburgh Bibliographical Society is about to
publish a book entitled ‘The David Hume Library’... The ESTC has been invaluable
in carrying out this work ... and the ESTC numbers are given as references.’
Brian Hillyard, National Library of
Scotland, Edinburgh.

‘ESTC was the only available source of information
for Cottle’s total ... publications. ... I can say, without question, that
the online ESTC made these articles possible. ... I can also point out
that ESTC greatly facilitated my PhD dissertation.’Alan
Boehm, Columbia, Missouri.

‘While the book that O M Brack, Jr., and I are working
on is not yet published, we have used the ESTC extensively in organizing
and documenting what is known as the Lauder Controversy ... Without the
ESTC, [this] could never have been conceived, never mind executed.’ Jesse
G. Swan, Assistant Professor of English.

‘For a book dealer with specialist interest in the
18th century, ESTC on-line has probably been the single most useful addition
to our bibliography >shelves’. ... ESTC is also great for gaining biographical
details on very minor people who do not make it into DNB. ... Our main
area of interest is in early art manuals, ... In this area there is no
bibliography and so for the last 12 years we have been building up a database
... ESTC has contributed greatly to this, resolving problems in a way impossible
by traditional means, ... Without the ESTC cataloguing would be a lot less
interesting, less fun, and less creative.’ Tony
Fothergill, Ken Spelman Rare and Antiquarian Books.

‘It has simply transformed our lives. ... We will never
be the same. If you lost everything in a research file and you could remember
just one thing - the author, title, subject - you could find out all the
rest. You don’t have to look at card catalogs. You can search a data base.
... With the ESTC, it is possible to find anything all the time.’ Paul
J. Korshin, Professor, University of Pennsylvania. The Chronicle of Higher
Education, July 22, 1992. ‘Vast electronic catalog transforms research
on the 18th century’ by Beverly T. Watkins. ‘In the past, I would consult
a printed bibliography and then simply travel to libraries I thought were
likely to have the works I was seeking, ... Now, with a few strokes of
the [computer] keys, I can pinpoint exactly what I’m looking for.’ David
Vander Meulen, University of Virginia. Los Angeles Times. ‘Giant Bibliography
will be one for the history books’ by Jenifer Warren.

‘ESTC on CD-ROM is a breakthrough for students of the
eighteenth century, enabling personalized sorts of hundreds of thousands
of records of eighteenth-century publications and their location. Its availability
will invigorate eighteenth -century studies, ...’ James
Raven. Times Literary Supplement, Dec. 11, 1992. ‘Swift search’.

‘As a professional in the booktrade these 40 years, the ESTC has been my compass. It is my first resource in compiling sale catalogues, especially regarding fine points of authorship. With recent coordination from Simon May (ESTC, British Library), a wise and judicious associate, I was able to correct (August 2010) the ESTC records for two 1799 political pamphlets written by one of my favorite writers: Mary Anne Emmet, later Holmes, of the famous Emmet line of Irish patriots and writers. When historians construct a continuum of Irishwomen's political writings, they now will benefit from these two new ESTC records: N19124 and T18211. With the new records as bibliographic precedent, this breaking news can now be submitted to the new Dictionary of Irish Biography, 9 vols (Royal Irish Academy; Cambridge UP, 2009). At present, I am the sale agent for the Gerald M. Goldberg Collection (NY), mostly 18th-century imprints; and again ESTC is my faithful compass.’ Richard Aaron, Am Here Books (Ollon, Switzerland, 1970 ~ Camp Point, Illinois, 2007-).http://www.abebooks.com/am-here-camp-point-il/92190/sf

‘Concealed authorship, the most challenging field in literary research, begins and ends with the ESTC. When I undertook in the late 1980s the identity and pseudonymous writings of 'Ephelia', long considered an intractable case in the annals of 17th-century attribution, my initial task was to scour the ESTC for a bibliographic baseline of received opinion and recorded 'fact.' And the rest is history. Owing to broad multimedia investigations, I was able to construct (at last) a reasonably persuasive attribution (see 'Ephelia', Ashgate 2003; also 'Ephelia', BL, EEBO, The Orlando Project, etc.). With cautious direction from Patricia Hargis (ESTC, UC-Riverside), I also was able to reconstruct the several ESTC records on this intriguing poetess of political broadsheets, amusing coterie verse, and bold 'female poems' -- and add a valuable new record. This exercise in scholarly detection came full circle: it began and ended with the ESTC. Again, the ESTC proved a critical resource in my essay on the sale of the Peyraud Collection (ECS, Fall 2009) and also in a commissioned piece on Frances Burney (The Burney Letter, Spring 2010).’Maureen E. Mulvihill, Princeton Research Forum, NJ.http://www.ephelia.com

Crump, M. & Harris, M. (Eds.). (1983).Searching the
eighteenth century: papers presented at the symposium on the Eighteenth
century short title catalogue in July 1982. London : British Library in
association with the Department of Extra-Mural Studies, University of London.

Darnton, Robert.(1995). The forbidden best-sellers of pre-revolutionary
France. New York : W.W. Norton.

Echeverria, Durand & Wilkie, Everett C.(1994).The
French image of America: a chronological and subject bibliography of French
books printed before 1816 relating to the British North American colonies
and the United States. Metuchen, N.J. : Scarecrow Press.

Folkenflik, Robert (Ed). (1993). The culture of autobiography:
constructions of self-representation. Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University
Press. Series title: Irvine studies in the humanities.

Fabian, Bernhard,ed. Jefcoate, Graham & Kloth, Karen, compilers.
(1987). A catalogue of English books printed before 1801 held by the University
Library at Gottingen. Bernhard Fabian (Ed.). New York : Olms-Weidmann.

Kronenfeld, Judy.(Forthcoming 1997). King Lear and ‘The naked
truth’: an inquiry into the role of history and language in criticism.
Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press.

Law Society.(1994). Catalogue of the Law Society’s Mendham Collection:
lent to the University of Kent at Canterbury and housed in Canterbury Cathedral
Library. Sheila Hingley & David Shaw (Eds.). London : Law Society.

Maslen, Keith & Lancaster, John (Eds.). (1991). The Bowyer
ledgers: the printing accounts of William Bowyer, f’Ther and son, reproduced
on microfiche: with a checklist of Bowyer printing, 1699-1777, a commentary,
indexes, and appendixes. London : The Bibliographical Society; New York
: The Bibliographical Society of America; [distributed by] Oxford University
Press.

Raven, James.(1987). British Fiction 1750-1770 A chronological
check-list of prose fiction printed in Britain and Ireland. Newark, De.
: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto : Associated University
Presses.

Bidwell, John.(Forthcoming). ‘Printing supplies’ History of
the Book in America, vol. 1. New York : Cambridge University Press.

Hillyard, Brian.(1990). ‘Working towards a history of Scottish
book collecting’ Six centuries of the provincial book trade in Britain.
Peter Isaac (Ed.). Winchester, Hampshire, England : St. Paul’s Bibliographies.

Boehm, Alan D.(Forthcoming). ‘The 1798 lyrical ballads and the
poetics of late eighteenth-century book production’ English Literary History
63. pp. 453-487.

Dawson, Robert L.(1990). ‘Notes on 18th century French books
printed in Britain’ Bulletin du bibliophile, new series.

Ihalainen, Pasi. (1994). ‘Language and literature in intellectual
history: early eighteenth-century political literature as historical source’
English Studies and History. David Robertson (Ed.). pp. 223-244.

Ihalainen, Pasi.(Forthcoming). ‘Schisms, heresies, and freethinking
in English political discourse, 1700-1730".

Voss, Paul J.(Ed.). (Forthcoming). ‘The poetics of the archive’
Studies in the literary imagination. Special issue.

Dissertations

Allen, Susan M.(1996). The impact of the Stamp Act of 1765 on
Colonial American printers: threat or bonanza? University of California,
Los Angeles.

Boehm, Alan D.(1992). The poetics of literary commerce: patrician
and popular book-selling and the rise of publishing, 1700-1825. Indiana
University. Cody, Lisa. (1993). The politics of body contact: disciplines
of reproduction in Britain, 1688-1834. University of California, Berkeley.

Pearson, Velvet.(In progress). The influence of French culture.
University of Southern California.

Stanger, James. (Forthcoming 1996). William Blake’s true faculty
of knowing: the human form divine, the form of the book, and the opening
of the eye. University of California, Riverside.

Veylit, Alain.(1994). A statistical survey and evaluation of
the Eighteenth-Century Short-Title Catalog. University of California, Riverside.

‘Knife-edge fun’.(June 25, 1977). The Times (London) (Description
of a project ‘find’).

White, Martin. (July 9, 1977). ‘The man with a treasure trove
in his 'in' tray’, Daily Mail (Six months down. Only 14 1/2 years to go.
Dr. Alston is wading his way through the uncatalogued material in the British
Library).

Adamson, Lesley. (July 1, 1977). ‘The hunting of the callowaypoofe’,
Guardian (The project gets under way - the finding of cargo lists with
words not listed in OED).

Cotton, David A.(June, 1978). ‘My misfortune’, L.A. Record Vol.
80 (6) (A letter concerning the first publication of the cataloguing rules
- Short titles ... it is also short of a contents page, index, CIP entry
...’).

Morley, William F.E. (May 20, 1980). ‘The ESTC’. Bulletin of
the Bib. Soc. of Canada No.14 (Urges co-operation with the project ...
Canada should be making its contribution too. There's no time to be lost,
if we are to participate fully!’).

Korn, Eric.(May 23, 1980). ‘Remainders’.. Times Literary Supplement
(Piece on ‘Factotum, the world's most literate journal ... It's a genial
periodical, often raffish ... not a whit daunted by its high purpose.).

‘Librarians Meet.’ (November 5, 1980). The Daily Gleaner [Fredrickton,
New Brunswick] (Meeting of Canadian Association of Research Libraries with
a picture of R.C. Alston talking with Gertrude Gunn, President of CARL).

‘Green is good for your eyes’.(September, 1981). CABLIS no.
65 (Precis of an article in Factotum no.12).

‘ESTC receives records from the Fondren Library’. (October, 1981).
Fondren Library Bulletin, new series Vol. 8 no. 1 (Description of the project
and the contribution of the Fondren Lib. (6700 reports)).

Stockham, Peter.(April, 1984). ‘Using the Eighteenth Century
Short Title Catalogue’. Antiquarian Book Monthly Review (A review of ESTC:
the BL Collections and a discussion of the use of the online file).

‘ESTC enters phase two’. (May, 1984) BLAISE Newsletter No. 68.

Maxted, Ian.(May, 1984). ‘On-line for the eighteenth century’,
Rare Books Group Newsletter No.23 (A report of the meeting arranged by
the Local Studies and Rare Books groups of the LA on ESTC).

Maxted, Ian.(June, 1984). ‘The ESTC and its importance for the
Local Studies Librarian’, Local Studies Librarian Vol.3, no.1.

‘ESTC: the international phase’(June, 1984). BL News No. 98
(Announces the 10,000 non-BL records. ‘The total number of libraries represented
as locations ... exceeds 400 and is likely to rise to 700 ...’).

Bourne, Ross M.(1984). ‘A kutatok segitoje: a bibliographia
es a bibliografiai szazmbavetel’ Konyvtari Vol.30 no.2 (ESTC is taken as
an example in the context of a discussion of the importance of standards
and means of access).

Snyder, Henry L.(1984). ‘The ESTC: its origin and use as a bibliographic
tool’, The state of Western European Studies, Haworth Press: New York (Selected
papers from the Symposium on Western European studies and North American
Research Libraries held May 8-11, 1983).

‘Eighteenth-century short title catalogue’(1984). Annual Report
of the National Library of Ireland (Discusses the benfits anticipated from
joining the project).

Boston, Richard.(March 9, 1985). ‘Shelf life under the dome’.
Guardian (Piece on the storage problems of the BL; the need to control
the holding by means of catalogues (preferably machine readable) and thence
to ESTC).

Shurkin,, Joel.(April 3, 1985). ‘Libraries to undertake huge
bibliography task’. Stanford University Campus Report (An interview with
John Haeger of RLG on the link with the BL and the editing of ESTC, by
both editorial offices, on a single mainframe).

‘Symposium on the ESTC’. (April, 1985). CABLIS.

Krummel, D.W.(June, 1985). Choice (A review of the project and
its publications).